The Not-Fun of Traveling
By the time you read this, I’ll be visiting friends outside New York City for a week at Christmas. Lucky, lucky me. This is not, alas, a post how awesome a time I’m having in NYC. I am (wisely, IMHO) writing this before I leave home. Which means, this is a post on what a pain in the backside it is, prepping to cross the country for one flippin’ week. I love traveling. Let me rephrase that. I love having traveled. I love being in a new place, exploring, finding cool stuff, seeing new things–but I do not love having to travel to get to new places. I do not love commercial airlines, two-hour pre-flight security check-ins, measuring my bags to see if I have the right size luggage or need to go buy something, flying Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve to save myself (a heckuva lot of) money. I do love car trips if there are cool things to see on the way and I can pull over and look closer if I want to. I do not love “you’ve got four days of vacation, three nights at awesome place NOW GET THERE IMMEDIATELY AND THEN GET BACK FASTER.” I don’t love packing. I don’t love peacekeeping between frazzled travel companions forced into close proximity for long periods of time. I don’t love the stress of being in charge when things (inevitably) go wrong. But I do love exploring new places, and to do that you have to…